India based Firefly Creative Studio has posted a nice 5 minute effects reel for the work they did on S. S. Rajamouli's "Baahubali: The Beginning" film. Watch it on Vimeo.

The Foundry has announced a new beta of Katana, its look development, lighting and scene assembly tool. Katana 2.5 introduces support for Windows, until now it had only been available for Linux, as well as easier installation; a wider range of supporting plug-ins including RenderMan, V-Ray, Arnold and 3Delight; color and float ramp widgets; the ability to add light filters; performance diagnostics and improved documentation. You can read more about the release and sign up for the beta on the Foundry's website.

MPC has released a new demo reel featuring their latest work in feature film. Watch it on YouTube.

CG Channel has posted a thorough review of Iray renderer, now separated from 3DS Max and commercially available from Nvidia on a yearly rental: "It does what Nvidia claims it does: achieve photorealistic results with a minimal amount of tweaking." Read the review in full on CG Channel.

You can't have missed the global success of Pokemon Go, the location based game that uses AR and GPS data to let players capture Pokemon in the "real world", but did you know it was made with Unity? It's little wonder then that TechCrunch reports Unity technologies has secured $181 million in a recent round of funding, with two sources quoted by the New York Times saying that this now values the company at approximately $1.5 billion. The rise of Unity is attributed in part to their their multi-platform publishing tools, mobile in particular, and focus on emerging VR and AR technologies. In recent figures Unity report a user base of over 5.5 million (compared to Epic's 2 million). You can read more details about this story on TechCrunch.

Russian artist Sergey Kritskiy has released Perspective Tools 2, a handy Photoshop extension for creating perspective and parallel grids, transforming layers in perspective space, and unwrapping perspective distortion to a plane. It's available now on Sergey's Gumroad page.

Mathematic, a motion design studio based in Paris, France, has posted a breakdown video of the work they did on Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands, for Ubisoft. Watch it on Vimeo.

Researchers from Disney and Dartmouth College have studied existing approaches for denoising Monte Carlo renderings and have come up with a new algorithm that offers state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of scenes. More on Disney Research's website.